USPTO Awards Patent To Disgraced Scientist For Fraudulent Work

from the I-don't-even dept

Here on Techdirt, we're pretty inured to the excesses of the patent system. But just when you think you've seen everything and plumbed the deepest depths of ridiculousness, along comes something like this:

Korean researcher Hwang Woo-suk electrified the science world 10 years ago with his claim that he had created the world's first cloned human embryos and had extracted stem cells from them. But the work was later found to be fraudulent, and Dr. Hwang was fired from his university and convicted of crimes.

Despite all that, Dr. Hwang has just been awarded an American patent covering the disputed work, leaving some scientists dumbfounded and providing fodder to critics who say the Patent Office is too lax.

But it would be too easy to mock the USPTO for explaining that:

the system operates on an honor code and that patent examiners cannot independently verify claims.

Instead, I'd like to draw attention to this revealing comment from Kevin E. Noonan, a biotechnology patent lawyer, as quoted in the New York Times story:

"If it's bad, it's not going to be worth very much," Mr. Noonan said. "Who is going to sue on this patent?"

The answer, of course, is many people would -- specifically, patent trolls, who have no problems taking a worthless patent and using the mere threat of litigation to squeeze money out of companies just to get them to go away. That, and patents being granted on discredited ideas, as here, are just some of the many problems that the USPTO needs urgently to address.

I've got it!

I'll just file for a patent on filing for patents with a computer, then when it goes through(which it will, because of the magic words 'with a computer'), I'll turn around and shake dow- I mean send generous settlement offers to people filing for such insane patents.

I'll make millions, and/or at least slow down the deluge of stupidity coming out of the patent office, it's a win-win situation.

for the USPTO to stop doing things like this, to clean up it's act, it would first have to admit, if only to itself that it is a fucking disgrace that needs to be closed down, then replaced with a true Patent Office that did a proper job! cant see that happening any time soon!

Shell corporations should not be allowed to sue anyone, or at least they should be confined just to being allowed to sue other shell corporations. Being sued by a throw-together shell company with no assets and nothing to lose does not and will never have anything to do with justice.

Patent is invalid

Per various legal sources, "The disclosure (patent specification) must enable one skilled in the art to put the invention into practice." If the inventor's work was fraudulent, the patent would certainly be ruled invalid if brought to suit. Any troll will have to step very carefully here.

Re: Patent is invalid

But most trolls don't *want* to bring the patent to suit... They just threaten to do so unless you give them a license fee that is small relative to the cost of fighting them in court. So, for a troll, an indefensible-in-court patent is basically as good as a defensible-in-court patent.

Improved USPTO scrutiny

In order to give patents more scrutiny, the USPTO is proud to announce that it will be making changes to its patent application review process.

Whereas presently, patent applications are thrown into a room full of kittens with PATENT GRANTED stamps affixed to their feet; in the future the kittens will no longer be blindfolded in order to afford greater scrutiny to patent applications.

"the system operates on an honor code and that patent examiners cannot independently verify claims."

Patents grant someone an exclusive right. Put a little more correctly they remove a normal right from the rest of us. Now I find out all you have to do is claim you have "honor" to take away my rights?!

Wow, America is doing a great job protecting the rights of its citizens!

Can You Patent An Idea?

Someone claiming to be a lawyer once told me that you can’t just patent an idea, it has to be “reduced to practice”. As far as I can tell, that doesn’t actually mean you have to demonstrate it actually working, you just have to describe it in sufficiently technical-sounding and flowery* legal terms that it sounds like it might work.

*Insofar as legal terms can be described as “flowery”. Perhaps “fungidly”** might be more appropriate.**What do you mean that’s not a word?

"preloaded" patents

But aren't patents routinely filed for things that have not actually been done yet? For instance, if tomorrow a company discovered the secret to, let's say, harness the energy of nuclear fusion, would it not have to deal with a myriad of previous patents, despite being the first one to actually discover a viable method of achieving fusion?

I thought that was the whole idea behind patent trolling -- file patents relating to everything you can think of that might conceivably, some day in the future, be discovered, developed, or commercialized ... and then patiently wait years for these things to happen so you can then step in and assert your claim.